Decameron

Nils Ben Brahim

Info: We are pleased to announce Decameron, the first solo exhibition by Nils Ben Brahim with the gallery. Nils Ben Brahim (b. 1999 Berlin) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts in 2025 as a Meisterschüler of Thomas Zipp. Decameron – A hand presses into a surface that could be wet sand, could be fur, could be the back of an animal. The fingers are pushed deep enough that the wrist disappears into a knit cuff at the edge of the perforated sheet. Layered from soft pencils, the graphite has been worked into the paper until the tooth closes up, the surface taking on a delicate, breathable density closer to mezzotint than to drawing. The hatching disappears into surface; the mark is not gesture but tone. On another sheet a tower rises from a rocky plain, coiling in receding tiers toward a sky banked with cloud. Where the lower storeys are still under construction, the upper levels are already crumbling. It is Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, copied at the dimensions of a paperback. Yet Bruegel is less quoted than absorbed. Where the original panel measures roughly sixty by seventy-five centimetres, here, on the A6 sheet, the entire architecture of human ambition has been compressed to something a reader could hold in one hand, drawn the way like everything else one had seen. History painting, reduced to the size of a glance. (…)